Only Love Can (Reign Over Me)
I began this painting in September 2017. The blues and clear focus felt like a good next step following The Apotheosis of Hope. But then the fires hit all around us (we live a couple hours north of San Francisco) and our air was awash in smoke, the light was ever orange-gold, and everything was chaotic and burning. Suddenly cool blue didn't seem so important even if it felt trite to say so.
At the time, too, we'd taken in some cats that our [terrible] neighbors abandoned when they moved. One of those cats, Mu, who Violet had rather fallen in love with, was seized by our neighbor's dog and killed. It was brutal. This would be, in and of itself, rather tragic, but she had already been suffering from depression. There had been a lot of loss in her life recently and it'd been building, draining, challenging. The death of this sweet new kitty sort of rocked the boat in a serious way she tumbled even deeper.
A Transitive Nightfall of Diamonds
"Each note is like a whole universe. And each silence.... And the quality of sound and the degree of emotional... It's like the most important thing in the world. It's truly cosmic."
Jerry Garcia in "The Rolling Stone Interviews"
Loud fuzzy distorted sustained amplified strummed plucked looped shredded wah wah wah wailing upon and fed back through layer upon layer of chord progression melody line guiding me and dividing me and finding that perfect note, that golden chord, that crying out tone of my soul.
The Apotheosis of Hope
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Alexander Pope
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
Hope.
When the Smoke Cleared
So the past couple of weeks at our home in the Northern California have been challenging. We moved an hour north of Napa back in December and, after the wettest winter on record, we had the hottest (and driest) summer on record which led to the worst fires, you guessed it, on record.
Our air was thick with smoke and we woke every morning examining the current fire maps. We were rather surrounded - to the north, south, and west at times less than ten miles from the brunt of them. When everything is like a tinderbox and winds may shift at any moment, that ten miles doesn't seem so far. Some friends transported all of our artwork to Oakland for safekeeping - 'just in case. Our bags remained packed next to the cat carriers by the front door.
Summertime Paintings 2015
Years ago I got into a kind of creative flow that went like this: winter was when I worked on large, detailed paintings while summer was for getting out and doing things and events and traveling and the like. I found myself painting and sort of hibernating during many winters because life feels quieter and more internal. It's helpful for allowing my mind and body to settle, focusing on the finer details of my work. Come summer - when life bursts with exuberant busy-ness, I'd pick up and go out and share and be more social. During those summer months, I often plan out a course of paintings to work through the winter - a general game plan, if you will - a setlist of paintings - and return to the studio.
It's like a moebius strip where I would go far enough inwards in one direction that I'd eventually circle back in the opposite direction… and then far enough out in the other direction, and so on. Back and forth, round and round.
Surrender
I was going through all sorts of files, updating web stuff, doing businessy things, cataloging and organizing, as one has to do. Sometimes I'm struck by the fact that there is just so much art I've created over many years. And much of it, I think, returns to this painting, Surrender (28" x 48"), painted in 1996 when I was 19.Painting it was a turning point in my life. I'd had this experience earlier that summer which had left me filled with questions and doubts. Basically, I was struggling with letting go of the yoke of social and parental expectations.
In my sketchbook, during one of my classes, I made a drawing the vision I'd had - after getting twisted around through some dark and frustrated rivers of mental constructs - of this land I arrived into of just... endless exuberant love with the sky folding into the earth and vice versa and these beings just dancing over the hills grabbing pieces of clouds and LOVE was written all over everything. I decided to paint it - maybe just the third or fourth painting I'd ever made.
The Dorky Painting
Back in 2003, inspired by a chapter of a strange (and at times problematic) book The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle, I painted "The Dorky Painting." As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the introduction "It's like an egg: everything that is supposed to be in there is in there." There's really nothing else like it. So this painting is based on one of the chapters in the book - "Dorky Day". I can't explain it - you just need to read it. Broadly, however, it is a chapter about clearing the cobwebs from the mind. This painting was made to help clear the cobwebs of my mind.
In any case, on a whim one night, I looked up Mr. Kotzwinkle's website and sent him a link to the painting along with a short note of thanks. Below, is his response.
Recognition (The Compassion of St. Francis)
St. Francis - he always seemed to be around when I was growing up. I had a St. Francis nightlight of glowing yellow translucent porcelain. A two foot tall concrete statue of him lived in the garden. He was over our big console TV, as a cross stitch on burlap or something - some coarse material. It was made in the 70s. In that image, St. Francis was walking outside and had a bird in his hand. I remember, too, a rabbit, another bird flying, and a butterfly. The stitching was sparse but there he was.
So he was around - the image and idea of him anyhow. But who was he, to me, growing up? Of all the characters of Christian pantheon - and I heard about plenty, having been raised Roman Catholic - he seemed to be the least mythic and the most human. He was a simple and gentle man, a monk, who loved nature and walked amongst the animals and saw the Divine in all things.
Fierceness: “First World Problem Child”
"My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death."
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Some thoughts on a painting. Or - what's this about? So.... here we go...
Fire Paintings from September 11, 2001
On September 11, 2001, I was living in Burlington, VT - painting, enjoying the coming autumn, etc. I didn't have a TV (still don't), never listened to the radio (still don't) and the internet was still just a plodding dirt road through the hills - not the information super highway it was to become.
I woke up that morning with a desire to paint big red fiery paintings. I had a couple of large pieces of masonite - a 4' x 4' square and a 4' x 2.5' rectangle - and a few cans of red, yellow, orange, and purple latex paints. So around 8 am, with a cup of coffee, I went at it. The diamond/square painting I called 'Phoenix.' The other was 'Unsquaring the Circle' and felt like a great release of energy.